Anyone have experience with FaceShop Pro?  From using the 15 day trial it appears the program doesn't make a very useful head morph and texture because:

• NO matter how carefully I follow the target face, the morphed head doesn't look the same once imported into Poser.

• The textures it makes for the head are only useful for a head only poser render or if the neck is covered.  The texture of the head is very different from the body texture.

What are people's impressions, and can you post examples of successful work copying a photo head/face?

This is a difficult thing to do in the Renderosity forums since they take a hard line position of copyright infringements (except in the case of avatars, it seems.) Any photo of anyone the least bit famous posted here as an example of what Face Shop can reproduce will be assumed to be a copyright violation unless you can prove otherwise. If you want to see examples, I would advise going to the Daz forums. You can find a Face Shop thread there that includes many (no doubt) criminally pirated publicity photos with the Face Shop attempts at duplication.

There are lots of threads here about this product with a pretty mixed message as to it's effectivness!
You might also want to look at some of those, they may have suggestions as to how to improve the results.
Also I think Paula Sanders did an article on it on the front page, that may also be a useful place to start!

Thanks for the replies.  I started with the Sanders front page story and the Daz forums.  Daz had a post by someone who had amazing results copying people into Poser.  She has created some amazing replicas, and I've emailed her for some tips.

This product in not a "Make Art Button".

The textures it produces are great but must be edited in a paint progarm to remove image shadow and mirroring artifacts, easy to do if you just paste the texture on an existing texture and bring them into harmony.

The morph also is not a simple one-click either. Most people generate at least two morphs from either the same source image or different ones and blend them. A single morph used alone should not be dialed over about .6 in anycase. The morph does not effect head scaling so that must be dealt with. I typically use the morph it first to bring some organic life to the Daz mesh and second as a starting point for additional morph dialing...

I would say that the FaceShop morph gets me about 80% there and serves as a tremendous guide to understanding what is characteristic about the face and how to approach the fine tuning with standard morphs. I actually don't use  source photos of celebrities or anyone I know, just generic artist models from Levius and elsewhere to get figures that look unlike the Daz base and have some more livelyness. I have gotten nice celebrity likness is testing though. I have also for instance created a morph for the Poser 4 Nude Man head to make it resemble closely the M3 default head.

There is a learning curve and skill/tallent does play a roll in the results you get. Performance is greatly enhanced by the extent to which you are willing to prep the source photos and even spawn head geometry already morphed to the facial expression shown in the photo for the application to work on. It is a character makers tool not a one-click cloner. I am very very happy with the results I have gotten and I think it is a great addition to my Poser work. I look forward hopefully to the continued development of this product.

I think people either love it or hate it. The people who do not like it are put off by the idea of doing the prep and post work (N.B. the vendor promos show results achieved without this extra work) and by the bare bones user interface design. The people who do like it see it as a labor saver, a more efficient and effective approach to the objective that failed Poser Face Room module promised. It is most voluable to me for the subtle livelyness or realism I think it endows on the more sterile Daz mesh.

For what it is worth, that is my review.

I have a question about Face Shop.

I notice that the figures used seem to always be M3 and V4. Can Face Shop be used with other figures such as Aiko or V3 or SP3 too or are you limited to just being able to use M3 and V4?

Quote - Thanks for the replies.  I started with the Sanders front page story and the Daz forums.  Daz had a post by someone who had amazing results copying people into Poser.  She has created some amazing replicas, and I've emailed her for some tips.

Dr Geep has a whole tutorial on working with FaceShop Pro on his website. Very detailed.

Here is the link to the tutorial, plus a link to the rest of his site for many other tutorials:

http://www.drgeep.com/NPU/admin/mainoffice/FaceShop/FaceShop.htm

http://drgeep.com/

Face Shop is limited to M3 and V4 but Face Shop Pro takes any head mesh you export from Poser so I have used it with a variety of low res figures such as the old Poser 4 and also you can set up an open mouth smile and such prior to export to Face Shop Pro. I like using Victoria 3 Reduced Resolution a lot for both male and female heads.

I've gone through Dr. Geep's tutorial.  The problem is that the texture map he uses is completely different from the one generated in my attempts.  He has a black area beneath all the good texture area, which he says to remove.  Mine has no black area, because there are ears or something in that area.

It's helpful, but doesn't get close to what I saw in those examples.

I'm following Dr Geep's tutorial while using Hiro 3 as my model.  It seems the scalp skin and head skin are two different areas.

Hiro3HeadM texture is in the textures dir for Hiro, but when used as the head texture it doesn't work.

Can anyone point to a direction of help for FSP with Hiro?  Maybe it's not supported?

In the tutorial file I think it is there is an explination of preparing a head mesh for Face Shop Pro the first time.

The head part is exported from its default position after any expression morphs you might use such as "open mouth smile". Then in UVmapper Classic you select the face and lip materials on the head mesh and assign them to a new material called FaceShopSkin I think it is... the texture created by Face Shop will then be right on the lips. I suppose you could fix the materials with the grouping tool before leaving Poser if you wanted.

I never got that black neck effect... just a centerline from mirroring the texture and then shadows and hair that needed fixing up. I just paste on to a Merchant Resource texture and adjust the HSV to match.

Where do you get a 15 day trial of the Face Shop Pro program?

http://downloads.zdnet.com/download.aspx?docid=302899 is a site for the free trial.

I'll try that tutorial again, but the problem isn't the lips.  It's that:

1:  even .1 application of the morph hopelessly distorts the head.  I've now tried with Hiro, Apollo, Simon, and M3.

2:  the texture is a dark red, and is way off from the rest of the body.

All the tutorials talk about minor tweaks.  Someone who made dead on faces of some actresses said she practically uses the FSP texture right from the program, with very minor changes.  

I really don't get it.  Mine come out looking like some sort of monster.

Man, that sounds bad... you have checked how to do the export settings? Sounds like it just doesn't like you. I can't think of any advise :(